The Green Tent Mystery at Sugar Creek by Paul Hutchens (red white and royal blue hardcover txt) 📕
- Author: Paul Hutchens
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She sighed again and started in helping me. I decided to let her because I didn’t want to discourage her from helping a tired-out son with his work.
She was so quiet for about three minutes, while all we could hear was the lazy ticking of the old clock on the mantle and the sound of the plates and cups and saucers and silverware. Pretty soon Mom said, still sadly, “I feel so sorry for her. Poor thing. If only she could believe and trust in God!”
I heard myself sigh the same kind of sigh Mom had sighed and felt sorry for the woman myself—knowing whom Mom meant. Then I guess Mom had decided that I ought to know more about Mrs. Everhard—I already knowing a lot. First, though, she told me some things I never knew about the Collins family itself, still using a kind of sad voice and saying, “I want you to know before you get any older. It will help you to understand your mother and father better, and all other people who have had to bury a little baby.”
“What?” I thought, without saying a word. Mom’s voice sounded different than I had ever heard it as she went on. “Just two years before you were born, Bill, your father and I had to give back to God a very beautiful, little three-week-old, baby girl. She was so very lovely and sweet and it broke our hearts, but we have tried to thank Him that He let us have her to love even for such a little while—” Mom stopped and again all we could hear was the lonely clock that was ticking so sadly it seemed like it must have felt sorry for Mom too.
Mom, still being very serious, went on, saying, “Then God gave us you to take her place and you have been a great joy to us—” and again she stopped.
I knew that if all her thoughts had come out in words, she could have added, “and also a lot of trouble,” but Mom didn’t and I liked her even better, taking a sidewise glance up at her out of the corner of my eye.
I guess maybe I had seen my mother’s face a million times—and while it’s nearly always the same, I have never gotten tired of looking at it. She always looks just like my Mom even when she’s all tired out or sad and hasn’t had time to powder her nose from the hard work she is doing in the kitchen or out in the garden or orchard or somewhere.
“She’s a pretty wonderful mom,” I thought and swallowed something in my throat which stopped a couple of tears from getting into my eyes. Then I began working a little harder and faster on the dishes, which I had decided to help dry.
A little later Mom told me something else about the strange woman and her husband, who were camping down in the Sugar Creek woods—something Little Jim’s mom had just told her over the phone and it was that something had happened to the woman’s mind, which the doctors called by some kind of fancy name, which meant she was mentally ill and maybe would be for a while until she had time to get well again.
“Thousands of people get well from being mentally ill,” Mom explained, “just like children do from such things as chicken pox and whooping cough. Sometimes though they have to have a very special treatment in a special hospital.”
“I can understand how she feels,” Mom went on, “because for a long time after we had buried Little Nancy it seemed like she couldn’t possibly be dead. She had to be alive, I kept thinking, and I kept imagining I could hear her crying in the other room—”
“In there where Charlotte Ann is now?” I asked.
Mom didn’t answer for a minute. She only nodded and sighed again. Then she said, “I never actually heard her voice, of course.
“And that,” Mom finished, “is what is wrong with the dear little mother who is camping down there in the woods. You boys be very careful to be very kind and—”
“Is she an honest-to-goodness crazy woman?” I asked and shouldn’t have, not knowing I wasn’t supposed to say it, and Mom replied, “Thoughtful people never say that any more about a person who is ill in the way Mrs. Everhard is. They always say that they are not well emotionally. We try to understand them and to find out what made them that way, and sometimes when they themselves come to understand what caused their illness they begin to get well right away—in fact, some of them get well almost at once. Doctors try to give them something to hope for. It was only the grace of God and my believing in Him that spared me from going to pieces, myself,” Mom said. “He gave your father and me strength to stand the loss of your baby sister, Nancy.”
Say, when Mom said, “your sister,” I did get a lump in my throat because I was thinking what if it had been Charlotte Ann who had died.
“You boys must not act surprised when you find those little, freshly-dug holes here and there in the woods or along the creek because when she gets one of her sad spells she imagines her baby is still alive, even though it was buried, and she starts digging a hole in the woods or along the creek, looking for it. She thinks it was buried alive when she feels like that. She will dig a while and then stop to listen to see if she can hear it crying.”
When Mom said that I was remembering that we had seen her do that very thing in the old cemetery last night.
“Couldn’t the doctors make her well?” I asked Mom, and she said, “Not with just medicine alone. One thing the doctor has prescribed for her is that she attend some church regularly—a church where the minister believes and preaches the Bible and what it teaches about Heaven and the wonderful place it is, and how people can meet their loved ones there, alive and well—all through trusting in the Saviour. The doctor thinks that if Mrs. Everhard can learn to trust in God and to believe that she will see her baby again, she will be cured.”
WELL, it seemed after that wonderful talk with Mom that I, Bill Collins, was going to be a better boy than I had ever been in my life before—although I didn’t see how I could change all of me so quick. Anyway I thought I knew why Mom every now and then sighed even when I couldn’t see a thing to sigh about. Maybe a sad thought came to her that wasn’t caused by the hot weather or from being all tired out or because I might have been a bad boy, which I sometimes used to be.
Several weeks went by during which the gang found maybe twenty-five different-sized holes in different places in the woods and along the creek. Also we were not surprised when most anytime we heard a quail call and a turtledove answer it. Sometimes though it was the woman who gave the quail call and the man was the turtledove who answered.
It began to be almost fun to hear them because we could tell that they liked each other a lot. They were kinda like a gang themselves only there were only two of them and their whistling to each other was like a game of some kind—just like we ourselves played different kinds of games. It was like having a secret code. They wanted us all to stop at their green tent every day and nearly always Mrs. Everhard had something for us to eat, which made it easy to remember to stop. Of course, I had to go anyway to carry water from our iron pitcher-pump to them.
Each Sunday the Everhards came to our church to hear our minister, who in nearly every sermon mentioned something about Heaven and how to get there—such as when you know in your heart that you are an honest-to-goodness sinner and that you can’t save yourself—which nobody can—and if you trust the Saviour Himself to forgive all your sins, you will be sure to go there; and all the babies that ever died are already there on account of the Blood of Jesus Christ shed upon the Cross took care of all of them—things like that.
I had to watch myself to keep from looking across the church all the time to watch Mrs. Everhard to see if she was believing the sermon. The only thing was—instead of looking at the minister, she kept looking at Mom or Pop or me, whichever one of us was holding Charlotte Ann, like she wondered if we were taking care of her right.
One Sunday right in the middle of the sermon she quick stood up and walked down the aisle in a hurry to the outside door, and her husband after her. A little later I heard through the open window the station wagon motor start and I knew he was taking her back to the tent quick, she having left so maybe she wouldn’t cry in church.
That afternoon when Pop was helping our minister and some other men hold a jail meeting and Mom and I were alone, Mr. Everhard came over to our house to borrow Charlotte Ann a while.
“Borrow her!” Mom said with an astonished voice and face, and he answered, “Yes, Charlotte Ann looks so very much like our own Little Elsa used to look that I thought if Frances could hold her a while and listen to her as she pretends to talk it might make her feel better. She’s very much down today.”
Well, I had heard of people borrowing nearly everything else. Around Sugar Creek the gang’s different mothers borrowed different kinds of kitchen things, which they sometimes ran out of and had to have in a hurry—as fast as a boy could run to the neighbors and get it. Sometimes Dragonfly’s pop borrowed our brace and bit or Pop’s hand drill or keyhole saw and Pop would sometimes borrow them back again if he needed them in a hurry—I getting to run to Dragonfly’s house to get them—and not getting to stay and play with Dragonfly, which made it a very hard errand to be sent on. Also different members of the gang would borrow knives or fishhooks or bobbers or other things from each other.
But whoever heard of anybody borrowing a baby!
I could see Mom wasn’t going to like the idea and if she didn’t I wasn’t going to either, but because she felt so sorry for the lady and wanted her to get well fast, she quick thought up a way to say, “Yes,” without hurting Mr. Everhard’s feelings or her own.
“If you will borrow me too, that will be fine,” she said cheerfully, and he answered, “Certainly, it will soon be time for afternoon tea anyway.”
“What about me?” I said, all of a sudden trying to be funny and probably not being very. “Anybody want to borrow a good-looking, red-haired, homely-faced boy?”
I didn’t much want to go though on account of some of the gang might come over to play with me, but Mom said quickly, “Certainly, Son, come right along.”
And so it turned out that I went with Mom and Charlotte Ann and Mr. Everhard, I carrying a gallon thermos jug of cold, iron-pitcher-pump water to earn my twenty-five cents for that day.
Say,
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